Today (Nov. 16) marks the 25th anniversary of "Home Alone" - you know, that wacky Christmas film where our scamp of a hero fends off a home invasion via amusing booby traps.

Watching it again as an adult, though, I can't help but be struck by how seriously hurt the bad guys would be. I mean, wow. This is like "Tom and Jerry" levels of violence here, but with real people.

I took the occasion to ask Dr. Jeffrey Lubin, division chief for pre-hospital and transport medicine at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, to try and give us an idea of what the EMS team would have to deal with if these injuries happened to someone in real life.

Fortunately, Dr. Lubin was already familiar with the film.

"I've seen it more than once," he said. "But the last time I saw it was a long time ago."

I asked the doctor about some of the more dramatic injuries that the Wet Bandits suffer at the hands of Kevin's traps (or their own ineptitude):

Slipping on icy stairs: extreme pain and potential paralysis

One of the first obstacles faced by Harry and Marv are the stairs to the home, which Kevin had soaked with water. Both men slip and fall down the now ice-covered stairs.

Such accidents are extremely common in the winter. "We see plenty of people who slip on the ice," said Dr. Lubin. "We will activate our trauma team if you fall down more than twelve stairs."

"The natural thing to do is to put your hand out when you start to fall," he continued. "You can very easily fracture your wrist when you do that."

That wasn't the case for either Harry or Marv, though. Harry lands directly on his back, and spinal injuries are rarely good news.

"You can get fractures across all the vertebral column," said Dr. Lubin. "Depending upon what part gets fractured, it can range from a very minor inconvenience and pain, to paralysis."

Marv seems to land mostly on his buttocks, which is pretty fortunate.

"Landing on your butt is where God put some extra padding," according to the doctor. "But you can also damage your pelvis too. It can be very painful, but not particularly dangerous."

And should either men have struck their heads when falling, it gets even worse. But we'll touch on that a bit later on.

Burns to the head, face and hand: extreme pain and potential disability

The previous terminology on burn severity - first, second and third-degree burns - has been phased out, according to Dr. Lubin.

"We classify burns by the thickness of the burns," he said. And when Harry gets his hat lit on fire, he suffers what Lubin called a "full-thickness burn." That means the burn went all the way to the dermis, and among other things, means that he would never be able to regrow hair.

All things considered, though, burns to the scalp aren't as damaging as some other places on the body. However, as in all burn victims, "you want to make sure his airway wasn't involved with this," said Dr. Lubin. Also, burn victims "have trouble with infection, because the skin is the first line of defense."

Other than the scalp burn being incredibly painful, there's a danger regarding the hat itself: "If this cap is something like polyester, that could have melted onto his head, too. You'd have to get it off, but you'd cause more pain and damage while you did it."

But again, there are worse places to be burnt. "Face is worse, hands are worse," explained Lubin. And wouldn't you know it, both Harry and Marv seem to suffer burns in those exact places.

Harry places his hand onto a red-hot metal doorknob, and Marv is stuck in the face with an iron. (Granted, the iron didn't seem to be plugged in, but let's assume those red marks are burns. Otherwise, see below for more on facial injuries.)

"[Burns] over joints [are] worse," Dr. Lubin said. "When the skin heals after burns, it can be hard to open and close that joint. The hand is one of the more serious places. When it heals, you can lose the functionality of the hand. Not necessarily life-threatening, but you can certainly cause a lot of disability."

Stepping on a nail or glass: infection and potential amputation

After walking up tar-covered steps, Marv loses his shoes. This leaves him extremely vulnerable to both a giant nail and a scattered pile of breakable Christmas ornaments.

"Puncture wounds can be very difficult to keep clean," Dr. Lubin said. "It's very difficult to get in there to clean it . Things like tar can hide the bacteria. We put [puncture wound patients] on pretty strong antibiotics and cross our fingers to make sure it doesn't get worse. Those can be hard to take care of."

Some of the more common infections with injuries like these include Staphylococcus andStreptococcus, neither of which is good news. Furthermore, "deep tissue infection can form an abscess inside your foot," Dr. Lubin said.

Worst case scenario?

"If you have the right bacteria injected into your foot, you can get gangrene," he said. "And yes, that can end in amputation. But it wouldn't be real common if they get treatment."

Hit in the face with paint cans: broken nose and potential blindness

One of the most memorable moments in the movie is when Marv and Harry charge up the stairs after Kevin, who releases paint cans on ropes which swing directly into their faces.

Fortunately for our antagonists, nose injuries, while extremely painful, are rarely life-threatening. "The main problem with that, aside from pain and deformity, is to make sure they can breathe okay," Dr. Lubin said. "[The injury] can cause swelling and damage that can block airways, and that can kill you."

There's also a chance that, if the face was struck in just the right way, the paint cans could damage their eyes. "Eyes are relatively well protected," Dr. Lubin said, explaining how the eyeball is set back in the face and protected by the orbital bones around the eye cavity. However, enough damage to those bones can pinch or trap the nearby muscles.

"The muscles that help you move your eyes can get trapped and cause vision damage," he said. "It gets stuck and then you have trouble moving your eye. It's called a blowout fracture."

Striking someone in the chest with a crowbar: life-threatening heart or lung injuries

This is one that they can't blame on Kevin: after the child places a pet tarantula on Marv's face, he flails around, causing the spider to land on Harry's chest. Marv, in a rather foolish attempt to kill the spider, hits Harry full-force in the chest with a crowbar.

"There's lots of things that can cause," cautioned Dr. Lubin. "If you hit at just the right time, you can put someone in cardiac arrest. You deliver energy to the heart, and if you do that at the right time, the heart can stop."

But even if you don't immediately stop someone's heart with the blunt force trauma, there's plenty of other bad stuff you can expect. "You can break the sternum, cause bleeding in the lungs, cardiac contusion," Lubin continues. "With the right amount of force, something like a crowbar going fast, is a really big deal."

Blows to the head: concussions, cranial hemorrhaging and death

One of the more frequent injuries that both Harry and Marv suffer are big, heavy things, moving quickly, striking them in the head. Most notably, at the climax of the movie, (SPOILERS AHEAD!) the two thieves had Kevin at their mercy, only to be knocked unconscious by Kevin's neighbor, Old Man Marley, via blows to the head with his metal snow shovel.

"Being knocked unconscious obviously means it's a more severe injury," Lubin said. And in the short term, this sometimes means that EMS personnel need to ensure that the victim is still breathing.

Beyond that, there's always a danger of concussion when head injuries are involved. And any kind of trauma to the brain is never good.

"[You] can develop pretty severe bleeding when you strike the skull," Dr. Lubin said. "Subdural hematomas are one of the more common things you can see from this, as well as skull fractures."

And what, exactly, is a subdural hematoma?

"It's bleeding between the skull and the brain," he replied. And the results aren't pretty.

"There's only so much room inside your skull," Lubin explained. "There's enough room for brain, the blood that feeds your brain, and spinal fluid. And if any of those takes up more than its fair share, the pressure builds up and it can cause some severe damage to the brain tissue. There's also an epidural [hematoma], which is less likely, but possible."

In conclusion:

Knowing everything that he does about medicine, can Dr. Lubin - or any of us, for that matter, now that we've had this conversation - still enjoy cartoonish violence in television or movies?

Of course, Lubin says. (And thank goodness, am I right?)

"You have to take it with a grain of salt," he said."At the time [I first saw "Home Alone"]I was involved in emergency medical services too, in college. It doesn't bother me if you take it in the right vein. It goes back to the old days of slapstick humor, like the Three Stooges."